Tuesday, 22 July 2014

He aligned the global time zones, bringing up concept of standard time zone(Cosmic time)!!!

Sir Sandford FlemingKCMG (January 7, 1827 – July 22, 1915) was a Scottish-born Canadian engineer and inventor. He proposed worldwide standard time zones, designed Canada's first postage stamp, left a huge body of surveying and map making, engineered much of the Intercolonial Railway and the Canadian Pacific Railway, and was a founding member of the Royal Society of Canada and founder of the Royal Canadian Institute, a science organization in Toronto.
In 1827, Fleming was born in Kirkcaldy, FifeScotland to Andrew and Elizabeth Fleming. At the age of 14 he was apprenticed as a surveyor and in 1845, at the age of 18, he emigrated with his older brother David to Ontario (then the western half of the Province of Canada, at that time called Canada West). He qualified as a surveyor in Canada in 1849.
In 1849 he established the Royal Canadian Institute with several friends, which was formally incorporated on November 4, 1851. Although initially intended as a professional institute for surveyors and engineers it became a more general scientific society. In 1851 he designed the Threepenny Beaver, the first Canadian postage stamp. Throughout this time he was fully employed as a surveyor, mostly for the Grand Trunk Railway. His work for them eventually gained him the position as Chief Engineer of the Northern Railway of Canada in 1855, where he advocated the construction of iron bridges instead of wood for safety reasons.

In 1862 he placed before the government a plan for a transcontinental railway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The first part, between Halifax and Quebec became an important part of the preconditions for New Brunswick and Nova Scotia to join the Canadian Federation because of the uncertainties of travel through Maine because of the American Civil War. In 1867 he was appointed engineer-in-chief of the Intercolonial Railway which became a federal project and he continued in this post till 1876. Fleming served in the 10th Battalion Volunteer Rifles of Canada (later known as the Royal Regiment of Canada) and was appointed to the rank of Captain on January 1, 1862. He retired from the militia in 1865. 



After missing a train in 1876 in Ireland because its printed schedule listed p.m. instead of a.m., he proposed a single 24-hour clock for the entire world, located at the centre of the Earth and not linked to any surface meridian. At a meeting of the Royal Canadian Institute on February 8, 1879 he linked it to the anti-meridian of Greenwich (now 180°). He suggested that standard time zones could be used locally, but they were subordinate to his single world time, which he called Cosmic Time. He continued to promote his system at major international conferences including the International Meridian Conference of 1884. That conference accepted a different version of Universal Time, but refused to accept his zones, stating that they were a local issue outside its purview. Nevertheless, by 1929 all of the major countries of the world had accepted time zones.

Monday, 21 July 2014

By conditioning the air, this man changed the way we live!!!

Willis Haviland Carrier (November 26, 1876 – October 7, 1950) was an American engineer, best known for inventing modern air conditioningCarrier was born on November 26, 1876, in Angola, New York, the son of Duane Williams Carrier and Elizabeth R. Haviland. The Carriers lived in New England until 1799 when Carrier's great-grandparents joined an ox-team train of settlers pushing west through the Mohawk Valley. They settled in Madison County, New York and then in 1836 moved west again to Erie County. 

There they purchased the farm that became the birthplace and childhood home of Willis Carrier. His father, Duane, taught music to the Indians, tried running a general store, and was for a short time a postmaster, then settled down to farming and married Elizabeth Haviland. She died in 1887, when Willis was 11 years old. He studied at Cornell University graduating in 1901 with a BS in engineering.

In Buffalo, New York, on July 17, 1902, in response to a quality problem experienced at the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing & Publishing Company of Brooklyn, Willis Carrier submitted drawings for what became recognized as the world's first modern air conditioning system. The 1902 installation marked the birth of air conditioning because of the addition of humidity control, which led to the recognition by authorities in the field that air conditioning must perform four basic functions:
1.) control temperature; 2.) control humidity; 3.) control air circulation and ventilation; 4.) cleanse the air.


After several more years of refinement and field testing, on January 2, 1906, Carrier was granted U.S. patent No. 808897 on his invention, which he called an "Apparatus for Treating Air," the world's first spray-type air conditioning equipment. It was designed to humidify or dehumidify air, heating water for the first and cooling it for the second.


In 1906, Carrier discovered that "constant dew-point depression provided practically constant relative humidity," which later became known among air conditioning engineers as the "law of constant dew-point depression." On this discovery he based the design of an automatic control system, for which he filed a patent claim on May 17, 1907. The patent, No. 1,085,971, was issued on February 3, 1914.

On December 3, 1911, Carrier presented the most significant and epochal document ever prepared on air conditioning – his "Rational Psychrometric Formulae" – at the annual meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. It became known as the "Magna Carta of Psychrometrics." This document tied together the concepts of relative humidity, absolute humidity, and dew-point temperature, thus making it possible to design air-conditioning systems to precisely fit the requirements at hand.

With the onset of World War I in late-1914, the Buffalo Forge Company, for which Carrier had been employed 12 years, decided to confine its activities entirely to manufacturing. The result was that seven young engineers pooled together their life savings of $32,600 to form the Carrier Engineering Corporation in New York on June 26, 1915. The seven were Carrier, J. Irvine Lyle, Edward T. Murphy, L. Logan Lewis, Ernest T. Lyle, Frank Sanna, Alfred E. Stacey, Jr., and Edmund P. Heckel. The company eventually settled on Frelinghuysen Avenue in Newark, New Jersey.


Despite the development of the centrifugal refrigeration machine and the commercial growth of air conditioning to cool buildings in the 1920s, the company ran into financial difficulties, as did many others, as a result of the Wall Street Crash in October 1929. In 1930, Carrier Engineering Corp. merged with Brunswick-Kroeschell Company and York Heating & Ventilating Corporation to form the Carrier Corporation, with Willis Carrier named Chairman of the Board. Spread out over four cities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Carrier consolidated and moved his company to Syracuse, New York, in 1937, and the company became one of the largest employers in central New York.


The Great Depression slowed residential and commercial use of air conditioning. Willis Carrier's igloo in the 1939 New York World's Fair gave visitors a glimpse into the future of air conditioning, but before it became popular, World War II began. During the post-war economic boom of the 1950s, air conditioning began its tremendous growth in popularity.

In 1930, Carrier started Toyo Carrier and Samsung Applications in Japan and KoreaSouth Korea is now the largest producer for air conditioning in the world. The Carrier Corporation pioneered the design and manufacture of refrigeration machines to cool large spaces. By increasing industrial production in the summer months, air conditioning revolutionized American life.

Sunday, 20 July 2014

This astrophysicist is known for championing models alternative to big bang model!!!

Jayant Vishnu Narlikar (born July 19, 1938) is an Indian astrophysicistNarlikar is a proponent of steady state cosmology. He developed with Sir Fred Hoyle the conformal gravity theory, commonly known as Hoyle–Narlikar theory. It synthesizes Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Mach's Principle. It proposes that the inertial mass of a particle is a function of the masses of all other particles, multiplied by a coupling constant, which is a function of cosmic epoch. In cosmologies based on this theory, the gravitational constant G decreases strongly with time.

Narlikar was born in Kolhapur. His father, Vishnu Vasudev Narlikar, was a mathematician who served as a professor and later as the Head of the Department of Mathematics at Banaras Hindu UniversityVaranasi. Jayant's mother, Sumati Narlikar, was a scholar of Sanskrit language. Jayant studied in Kendriya Vidyalaya Banaras (till class 12) and Banaras Hindu University (12th Onwards) campus, Varanasi.

Narlikar received his Bachelor of Science degree from Banaras Hindu University in 1957. He then began his studies at Fitzwilliam HouseCambridge University in England, where he received a B.A. in mathematics in 1959 and was Senior Wrangler. This appears to have been the first time, and perhaps the only time, that a student was Senior Wrangler who was a non-collegiate member of the University at the time. In 1960, he won the Tyson Medal for astronomy. 

During his doctoral studies at Cambridge, he won the Smith’s Prize in 1962. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1963 under the guidance of Fred Hoyle, he served as a Berry Ramsey Fellow at King's College in Cambridge and earned an M.A. in astronomy and astrophysics in 1964. He continued to work as a Fellow at King's College until 1972. In 1966, Fred Hoyle established the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy in Cambridge, and Narlikar served as the founder staff member of the institute during 1966-72.

In 1972, Narlikar took up Professorship at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, India. At the TIFR, he was in charge of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group. In 1988, the Indian University Grants Commission set up the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune, and Narlikar became the Founder-Director of IUCAA.

Narlikar is internationally known for his work in cosmology, especially in championing models alternative to the popular Big Bang model. During 1994-1997, he was the President of the Cosmology Commission of the International Astronomical Union. His research work has involved Mach’s Principle, quantum cosmology, and action-at-a-distance physics.

During 1999-2003, Narlikar headed an international team in a pioneering experiment designed to sample air for microorganisms in the atmosphere at heights of up to 41 km. Biological studies of the collected samples led to the findings of live cells and bacteria, which introduced the possibility that the earth is being bombarded by microorganisms, some of which might have seeded life itself on earth. 

Narlikar was appointed as the Chairperson of The Advisory Group for Textbooks in Science and Mathematics, the textbook development committee responsible for developing textbooks in Science and Mathematics, published by NCERT, which are used widely as standard textbooks in many Indian schools.

The Hoyle–Narlikar theory of gravity is a Machian theory of gravity proposed by Fred Hoyle and Jayant Narlikar that fits into the quasi steady state model of the universe. The gravitational constant G is arbitrary and is determined by the mean density of matter in the universe. The theory was inspired by the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory for electrodynamics. Currently the theory does not fit into WMAP data. Narlikar and his followers are working on adding mini bangs with various creation fields to explain the anisotropy of the universe.

Saturday, 19 July 2014

The determined inventor started developing revolver beginning from pepperbox off scrap wood since the age of 15 !!

Samuel Colt (July 19, 1814 – January 10, 1862) was an American inventor and industrialist from Hartford, ConnecticutHe founded Colt's Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company (today, Colt's Manufacturing Company), and made the mass production of the revolver commercially viable. Colt's first two business ventures — producing firearms in Paterson, New Jersey, and making underwater mines — ended in disappointment. 


Colt's manufacturing methods were at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. His use of interchangeable parts helped him become one of the first to exploit the assembly line. Moreover, his innovative use of art, celebrity endorsements and corporate gifts to promote his wares made him a pioneer in the fields of advertising, product placement and mass marketing, although he was criticized during and after his life for promoting his arms through bribes, threats and monopoly.


Samuel Colt was born in Hartford, to Christopher Colt (1777-1850), a farmer who had moved his family to the city after he became a businessman, and Sarah Colt, née Caldwell. His mother's father, Major John Caldwell, had been an officer in the Continental Army and one of Samuel's earliest possessions was his maternal grandfather's flintlock pistol. At age 11, Colt was indentured to a farmer in Glastonbury, where he did chores and attended school. Here he was introduced to the Compendium of Knowledge, a scientific encyclopedia that he preferred to read rather than his Bible studies. 

Its articles on Robert Fulton and gunpowder motivated Colt throughout his life. He discovered that other inventors in the Compendium had accomplished things that were once deemed impossible, and he wanted to do the same. Later, after hearing soldiers talk about the success of the Double rifle double-barreled rifle and the impossibility of a gun that could shoot five or six times without reloading, Colt decided that he would create the "impossible gun".

In 1829, at the age of 15, Colt began working in his father's textile plant in Ware, Massachusetts, where he had access to tools, materials, and the factory workers' expertise. Following the encyclopedia, Samuel built a homemade galvanic cell and advertised as a Fourth of July event in that year that he would blow up a raft on Ware Pond using underwater explosives; although the raft was missed, the explosion was still impressive. Sent to boarding school, he amused his classmates with pyrotechnics. 

In 1830, a July 4 accident caused a fire that ended his schooling, and his father then sent him off to learn the seaman's trade. On a voyage to Calcutta on board the brig Corvo, he noticed that regardless of which way the ship's wheel was spun, each spoke always came in direct line with a clutch that could be set to hold it. He later said that this gave him the idea for the revolver. 


On the Corvo, Colt made a wooden model of a pepperbox revolver out of scrap wood. It differed from other pepperbox revolvers at the time in that it would allow the shooter to rotate the cylinder by the action of cocking the hammer and a pawl locking the cylinder in place, rather than rotating the barrels by hand and hoping for proper indexing and alignment.He had learned about nitrous oxide(laughing gas) from the factory chemist in his father's textile plant, so he took a portable lab on the road and earned a living performing laughing gas demonstrations across the United States and Canada, billing himself as "the Celebrated Dr. Coult of New-York, London and Calcutta". 


Colt conceived of himself as a man of science and thought if he could enlighten people about a new idea like nitrous oxide, he could in turn make people more receptive to his new idea concerning a revolver. He started his lectures on street corners and soon worked his way up to lecture halls and museums. As ticket sales declined, Colt realized that "serious" museum lectures were not what the people wanted to pay money to see and that it was dramatic stories of salvation and redemption the public craved.


Having some money saved and keeping his idea alive of being an inventor as opposed to a "medicine man", Colt made arrangements to begin building guns using proper gunsmiths from Baltimore, Maryland. He abandoned the idea of a multiple barreled revolver and opted for a new design, a rotating cylinder which would come into alignment with a single barrel due to his idea of a pawl engaging the cylinder and holding it in place.He sought the counsel of a friend of his father, Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, who loaned him $300 and advised him to perfect his prototype before applying for a patent. 


Colt hired a gunsmith by the name of John Pearson to build his revolver. Over the next few years Colt and Pearson fought over money, but the design improved and in 1835 Colt was ready to apply for his US patent. Ellsworth was now the superintendent of the US Patent Office and advised Colt to file for foreign patents first as a prior US patent would keep Colt from filing a patent in Great Britain. In August 1835, Colt left for England and France to secure his foreign patent.


Colt was the first American manufacturer to use art as a marketing tool when he hired Catlin to prominently display Colt firearms in his paintings. He employed an effective marketing program which comprised sales promotion, publicity, product sampling, and public relations. He used the press to his own advantage by giving revolvers to editors, prompting them to report "all the accidents that occur to the Sharps & other humbug arms", and listing incidents where Colt weapons had been "well used against bears, Indians, Mexicans, etc". In 2006, Samuel Colt was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Friday, 18 July 2014

The forefather of modern oenology!!!

Émile Peynaud (June 29, 1912 – July 18, 2004) was a French oenologist and researcher who has been credited with revolutionizing wine making in the latter half of the 20th century, and has been called "the forefather of modern oenology". Peynaud entered the wine trade at the age of fifteen with the négociant Maison Calvet. At Calvet he worked under the chemical engineer Jean Ribéreau-Gayon, and they developed methods of analysing the wines that were to be purchased.


In 1946, Peynaud completed his Doctorate at the University of Bordeaux and joined its faculty as a lecturer. Ribéreau-Gayon at this time was also teaching at the University, and the two shifted their previous focus of problems faced by Calvet to the problems faced by the winemakers themselves. While at the University of Bordeaux, where he became a professor of oenology, Peynaud worked at providing scientific explanations for many problems encountered in the process of wine making. 


He convinced the wineries to begin picking of grapes at vineyards up to two weeks later than usual, and to complete the picking as quickly as possible. The practice of also picking underripe or rotten grapes was abandoned, so that the selected fruit arriving at the winery was of the best possible quality. Peynaud introduced crushing and fermenting fruit in separate batches based on vine age, vineyard location, or any other factor that resulted in fruit of differing qualities in order to control tannin extraction. 

He then applied the cool fermentations used in Champagne to still white Bordeaux in order to control fermentation temperatures.
Proposing methods that ran counter to many traditions, in the 1950s and 1960s skeptics would use the term "Peynaudization" of Bordeaux, but as his advice usually produced superior wines, criticism came to an end.


Peynaud considered the control of malolactic fermentation to be one of his most important contributions to winemaking. It was commonly believed that malolactic fermentation was a sickness. He helped the wineries realize that they needed to encourage and control malolactic fermentation. He also stated, "Using only the very best grapes is a new phenomenon," considering this "the crowning achievement of work." Peynaud was the Decanter Man of the Year in 1990. Michel Rolland is one of his pupils.



Oenology, or enology  is the science and study of all aspects of wine and wine making except vine-growing and grape-harvesting, which is a subfield called viticulture. “Viticulture and oenology” is a common designation for training programmes and research centres that include both the “outdoors” and “indoors” aspects of wine production. An expert in the field of oenology is known as an oenologist. The word oenology is derived from the Greek οἶνος - oinos, “wine”, and the suffix -λογία-logia, "study of".

Thursday, 17 July 2014

The Subminiature camera Minox's creator!!!


Walter Zapp (4 September 1905 – 17 July 2003) was a Baltic German inventor. His greatest creation was the Minox subminiature camera. Zapp was born in RigaGovernorate of Livonia (now Latvia). In 1932, living in Estonia, he began developing the then subminiature camera by first creating wooden models, which led to the first prototype in 1936. It was introduced to the market in 1938. Minox cameras were made by VEF (Valsts Elektrotehniskā Fabrika) in Latvia. VEF made 17,000 Minox cameras.



During the Spring 1941 Resettlement of Baltic Germans, Walter Zapp moved to GermanyFrom 1941 to 1945, he worked on the development of electron microscopy at AEG in Berlin. After World War II, in 1945, he founded the Minox GmbH in WetzlarGermany. The company still exists. In 2001, when he went to Latvia for the last time, he said that he had gone to celebrate his 100th birthday in Latvia. He died at age of 98, in Binningen near BaselSwitzerland.



The innovative design and technical solutions of Zapp's camera were patented around the world. VEF received 66 patents in 18 countries for Zapp's inventionsLater in the 60's, Zapp was named as the inventor in several patents granted to Minox GmbH for improvements and modifications of a subminiature camera. On the beginning of 90's, Zapp patented his last invention, the Minox T8 pocket telescope.



Minox is a manufacturer of cameras, known especially for its subminiature camera. Walter Zapp originally envisioned the Minox to be a camera for everyone requiring only little photographic knowledge. Yet in part due to its high manufacturing costs the Minox became more well known as a must-have luxury item. 



From the start the Minox also gained wide notoriety as a spy camera. Minox branched out into 35 mm film format and 110 film format cameras in 1974 and 1976, respectively. Minox continues to operate today, producing or branding optical and photographic equipment. Minox was acquired by Leica in 1996, but a management buyout in 25 August 2001 left Minox an independent company again.

Wednesday, 16 July 2014

This science graduate, MBA with 10 honorary doctorates , teacher; synthesized 'seven habits of highly effective people'!!!

Stephen Richards Covey (October 24, 1932 – July 16, 2012) was an American educator, author, businessman, and keynote speaker. His most popular book was The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. His other books include First Things FirstPrinciple-Centered LeadershipThe Seven Habits of Highly Effective FamiliesThe 8th Habit, and The Leader In Me — How Schools and Parents Around the World Are Inspiring Greatness, One Child at a Time. He was a professor at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University at the time of his death.

(Habit constitution)(Habit constitution)
Covey was born to Stephen Glenn Covey and Irene Louise Richards Covey in Salt Lake City. Covey was athletic as a youth but contracted slipped capital femoral epiphysis in junior high school, requiring him to change his focus to academics. He was a member of the debate team and graduated from high school early. Covey earned a Bachelor of Science degree in business administration from the University of Utah, an MBA from Harvard University, and a Doctor of Religious Education (DRE) from Brigham Young University. He was a member of Pi Kappa Alpha International Fraternity. He was awarded ten honorary doctorates.


(Covey's quadrant)(Covey's quadrant)
Covey lived with his wife Sandra and their family in Provo, Utah, home to Brigham Young University, where Covey taught prior to the publication of his best-selling book. A father of nine and a grandfather of fifty-two, he received the Fatherhood Award from the National Fatherhood Initiative in 2003.


(Seven Habits)(Seven Habits)
In April 2012, Covey, an avid cyclist, was riding a bike in Rock Canyon Park in Provo, Utah, when he lost control of his bike and fell. Covey also suffered cracked ribs and a partially collapsed lung. Covey died from complications resulting from the bike accident at the Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center in Idaho Falls, Idaho, on July 16, 2012.

(Habits paradigm)(Habits paradigm)



Note: Please download & open the images for a clear view.

Tuesday, 15 July 2014

This essayist is attributed for the discipline of nephrology, was the first one to perform renal transplant too!!!

Jean Hamburger (15 July 1909 – 1 February 1992) was a French physician, surgeon and essayist. He is particularly known for his contribution to nephrology, and for having performed the first renal transplantation in France in 1952. Hamburger was born to a Jewish family in Paris. Together with René Kuss, Hamburger defined the precise methods and rules for conducting renal transplantation surgery, and is attributed with founding the medical discipline of nephrology. 

In 1952, at Necker Hospital in Paris, he performed the first successful renal transplant surgery between living patients in France, on a 16-year-old carpenter, Marius Renard who damaged his only kidney when he fell off scaffolding, using a kidney donated by the subject's mother. The organ failed, but rejection was staved off for three weeks, a record at the time. 

In 1955, he created the very first articifial kidney. Hamburger is credited with major breakthroughs in renal transplants: first prolonged success in 1953, first unqualified success between twins in 1959 and non-twins in 1962. He also authored basic research on the immunological basis of kidney disease, graft immunology and auto-immune diseases.

Hamburger married concert pianist Annette Haas, and had 3 children, Michel, Bernard and Françoise. In the 1950s, Hamburger contracted a lung infection which weakened him severely. Hamburger was the father of the well-known French singer-songwriter, Michel Berger. Hamburger died on 1 February 1992 in Paris.


Kidney transplantation or renal transplantation is the organ transplant of a kidney into a patient with end-stage renal disease. Kidney transplantation is typically classified as deceased-donor (formerly known as cadaveric) or living-donor transplantation depending on the source of the donor organ. Living-donor renal transplants are further characterized as genetically related (living-related) or non-related (living-unrelated) transplants, depending on whether a biological relationship exists between the donor and recipient. Exchanges and chains are a novel approach to expand the living donor pool.